Archive for the 'free shit' Category

Caroline Paquita of PEGACORN PRESS, reads and shows works with Jo Dery and Edie Fake

Sep ’11
26
7:00 pm

Caroline Paquita will be in Chicago to release the first two official works out on this small, “queer, feminist, total-art-freaker,” publishing house, Pegacorn Press. Using Risograph duplicators to create such works as her comic-zine WOMANIMALISTIC and an annual calendar, this once informal self-publishing venture officially expanded and became it’s own formal entity earlier this year.

In celebration, a 2012 calendar will be released, as well as a new comic compilation, featuring some of Chicago’s finest- Edie Fake and Jo Dery. Fake, Dery and a handful of artists in the U.S. and Germany were asked to create works surrounding the loose theme of of “2012,” and/or “THE FUTURE.” The result is a scintillating cornucopia of hilarity and social commentary, printed in an assortment of colored ink and paper-stock. Paquita’s yearly calendar features ”Womanimals” and other fanciful creatures gallivanting in jolly and curious environments. Wolves wearing wigs howl at the full moon, while tribes of Womanimals live in the trees with snakes and sloths- in 2012, anything is possible!

Also joining the bill is Edie Fake and Jo Dery. Both will be presenting work at this event, including some of Jo’s stunning animations.

Caroline Paquita is an artist/musician living and working out of Brooklyn, NY. Her work has been shown and distributed internationally and printed in such publications as Maximum Rock and Roll and Cometbus. A longtime creator of zines (Brazen Hussy, Zine Libs and most currently, WOMANIMALISTIC), a printmaker, and in general, a lover of all things made by hand, she began compiling heavy printing equipment in the hopes that one day she might begin a small publishing venture. PEGACORN PRESS is the result of this and her desire to create an environment where artists, particularly women and queers, are able to have the luxury to make work that will get printed and distributed to a larger audience. When she has spare time, she tends to her bees and hangs out with the chickens in her backyard.


Jo Dery
is an artist who experiments with narrative form, using both traditional and new media. Her works include short films/videos, drawings, prints, illustration, installation, and artist/small-press book publications. Through the playful invention of characters and events, she investigates her relationship to the built environment, natural phenomena, history and current events, as well as aspects of cognition and consciousness. She currently lives in Chicago.

Edie Fake was born in Chicagoland in 1980. He graduated from the Rhode Island School of Design in Providence in 2002 and has since clocked time in New York, Los Angeles, San Francisco and Baltimore. He’s received a Critical Fierceness Grant for queer art and was one of the first recipients of Printed Matter’s Awards for Artists. His drawings have been included in Hot and Cold, Creative Time Comics, and LTTR. Gaylord is his first full-length book. Currently, he lives in Chicago where he works as a minicomics sommelier for Quimby’s Books.

For more info:
http://pegacornpress.blogspot.com/
www.carolinepaquita.com
http://www.jodery.com/
http://vimeo.com/jodery
http://www.ediefake.com/

Art of Comics

Oots Ha-hoots! This month three great new art shows have opened in Chicago with a heavy focus on comics art and comics artists! Check out work by a throng of Quimby’s favorites:

At The Museum of Contemporary Art, 220 E. Chicago Ave:
New Chicago Comics
January 8 – 30, 2011

For the month of January, the MCA presents an exhibition of the work of four young, Chicago-based cartoonists and animators: Jeffrey Brown, Lilli Carré, Paul Hornschemeier, and Anders Nilsen. In their own unique styles each of these artists expands and challenges the conventions of a visual art form for which Chicago continues to be renowned: the comic book.

Jeffrey Brown’s autobiographical works examines modern relationships with discomforting detail and intimacy. His comics are drawn in a deliberately awkward and simple style that heightens both the emotional impact and charming humor of the stories. Each comic is written and drawn in an individual sketchbook, and Brown is showing a selection of these original books as part of the exhibition.

Lilli Carré is an animator and cartoonist who has produced a series of celebrated comics, illustrations, and hand-drawn, animated short films. Her work combines an elegant visual style with elliptical narratives that are imbued with an absurdist, and at times, unsettling humor. Along with a series of original illustrations, the exhibition includes a selection of Carré’s short films.

Paul Hornschemeier’s widely acclaimed comics incorporate complex, self-referential narrative structures that knowingly appropriate various comic book styles. A selection of his original blue graphite and ink drawings are on display.

Using a sparse aesthetic and narrative style, Anders Nilsen creates existentialist fables that revolve around the interactions between animals (birds and dogs) and young men. Nilsen shows a selection of original graphite and ink drawings from his recently completed 600-page comic Big Questions, which is to be published by Drawn and Quarterly in 2011.

At Los Manos Gallery, 5220 N. Clark Street, Chicago:
The StatiCCreep Exhibition of Sequential Art
January 14th to February 6th, 2011

Chicago has a bastion of dark horse artists that enrich the world of comic books through the imprint this city leaves on them. A certain noir factor absorbed through brick and steel-heavy architecture, inky black alleys and a history of subversive characters has worked its way under their skin.

Participating artists: Alex Wald, Andrew Pepoy, Chris Burnham, Corinne Mucha, Doug Klauba, Hilary Barta, Heather McAdams, Jeffrey Brown, Jenny Frison, Jill Thompson, Tony Akins, Nicole Hollander, Mike Norton, Mitch O’Connell, Sarah Becan, Dave Dorman, Nicole Hollander, Tim Seeley, Lucy Knisley, Gary Gianni, Steve Krakow and Bill Reinhold.

At Western Exhibitions, 119 N. Peoria, Suite 2A
Heads on Poles
January 14 to February 19, 2011

The iconic display of a head, severed and mounted on a stick, is ubiquitous as a representation of ominous primordial savagery. Cliché in its references to cannibalistic ritual, human sacrifice or cautionary symbolism, its general structure also contains rich connotations to formal art- a 3-dimensional image-object, laden with material and conceptual possibility.

For the purposes of this project, curators Paul Nudd and Scott Wolniak have adopted the concept of Heads on Poles as an open guideline to direct broad responses from a large group of artists. Over four dozen artists, ranging widely in discipline and style, were invited to produce sculptures loosely based on the formula of Head On Pole, in any material. These totem-objects will be simply placed, as casually clustered bodies, throughout the main gallery space of Western Exhibitions.

Additional artists have been asked to respond to the same theme with graphic works for a concurrent print project.

Through collective effort and the idea that creative freedom can occur within structural uniformity, Nudd and Wolniak hope to achieve a complex and immersive spectacle. Diverse interpretations are anticipated, with possible outcomes such as conceptual objects, portraiture, obscenity, abstraction, political gestures, humor and horror. With no attempt on the part of the curators to control submissions after the initial call for participation, the final group of works will be a surprise for all.

Participating artists: Mike Andrews, Ali Bailey, Jason Robert Bell & Marni Kotak, Nick Black, Daniel Bruttig, Andrew Burkholder, Lilli Carré, Joseph Cassan, Mariano Chavez, Ryan Travis Christian, Vincent Como, Bruce Conkle, Jean-Louis Costes, Vincent Dermody, Mike Diana, Edie Fake, Scott Fife, R.E.H. Gordon, John Hankiewicz, Keith Herzik, Carol Jackson, Bob Jones, Chris Kerr, David Leggett, Mike Lopez, Teena McClelland, Dutes Miller, Miller & Shellabarger, Joe Miller, Andy Moore, Max Morris, Rachel Niffenegger, William J. O’Brien, Onsmith, David Paleo, John Parot, Michael Rea, Tyson Reeder, Dan Rhodehamel, Bruno Richard, John Riepenhoff, Kristen Romaniszak, Steve Ruiz, David Sandlin, Mike Schuh, Mindy Rose Schwartz, David Shrigley, Edith Sloat & Sophie Greenstalk, Edra Soto, Ryan Standfest, William Staples, Ben Stone, Bill Thelen, Jeremy Tinder, Sean Townley, Jim Trainor, Anne Van der Linden, Jason Villegas, Sarah Beth Woods, Aaron Wrinkle

AND! While you’re at Western Exhibitions, check out Terence Hannum’s exhibit of work from his artist’s books in their Gallery 2:

Terence Hannum
Negative Litanies

Terence Hannum’s drawings, paintings and video installations cull the periphery of heavy metal and hardcore music subcultures to analyze the nexus of music, myth, audience and ritual. In addition to the above work, Hannum is a prolific zine maker and for his show in Western Exhibitions’ Gallery 2, Hannum will present a box set of 12 zines, all made in 2010, as well as drawings, paintings and other work that inspired the publications.

Exemplifying the DIY spirit inherent in the scenes he’s documenting, his use of the zine relates to the format’s origin, that of the self-produced fanzine. Hannum recontextualizes elements of his drawings, paintings, installations and even sound work in his zines, at times documenting the above works, but also casting new narratives intrinsic to the multi-page format.

Every month in 2010 Hannum produced a new zine, each one taking a different format, maximizing the possibilities of the cheaply printed page. He achieves remarkable textures, surfaces and images through seemingly simple combinations of toner on white, black and gray papers. Every subsequent zine ups the ambition from the prior one, as Hannum experiments with color xeroxes, collaborations (with New York artist Scott Treleaven and Chicagoan Elijah Burgher), vellum, sealed wax covers, obi bands and mini-CDs. Hannum pushes the zine to its extremes, much like the extreme sonic scenes he’s documenting and influenced by.

Dead Advice

cemetary

Do you hope to someday send a message to your loved ones from BEEEEEEYOOOOOOND THE GRAAAAAAAVE? Do you wish that day could be today without the hassle of dying?  Well, here’s a neat little project by Chicagoan Felix Jung we thought our death-obsessed friends might be interested in:

DEAD ADVICE, a website that acts as a repository for ruminations on life by folks pretending to be dead.  Check it out, either as one hoping to consume faux-posthumous wisdom, or as one wishing to contribute your own ultimate hindsight.

http://www.deadadvice.com

Trubble Club Celebrates Free Comic Book Day

May ’10
1
7:00 pm

trubbleclub2Like the underground comix artists in 1960’s Berkeley, Trubble Club brings together Chicago’s most talented young comics artists to draw some of the weirdest comics out there today. The group meets every Sunday at a rotating location and draws jam-comics together. One artist draws the first panel of a jam comic, and then passes it to another artist in the group to draw the second panel, who then passes it on to a third artist. This process is continued until the group has a finished comic. Trubble club then self-publishes the finished comics in minicomics.

Saturday, May 1st is Free Comic Book Day, when comic book stores around the country hand out free promotional comics to customers. Trubble Club will contribute a free comic, which apes PSA comics from the 70’s and 80’s, and will spend the evening drawing at Quimby’s, and prophesizing the future of audience members in comic-book form. Trubble Club contributors at the event will include Aaron Renier, Jeremy Tinder, Grant Reynolds, Russel Gottwaldt, Bernie McGovern, Lucy Knisley, Joe Tallarico, Nate Beaty, and many more. Refreshments for the event will be provided by Metropolitan Brewing, an Andersonville-based brewery whose German-inspired lagers are crafted with toasty malts, spicy hops and a ferocious DIY ethic.

Though the event starts at 7pm, Free Comic Book Day starts as soon as Quimby’s opens its doors at 11am. Quimby’s will have free comic books while supplies last from a host of artists. Free comics include the Short Pants Observer from Chicago-based small-press publisher, Short Pants Press, and the Xeric Grant winning graphic novel Black Mane by Michael LaRiccia.

For more info: http://www.trubbleclub.blogspot.com

MetroDayLogo

New Quimby’s Bookmarks! Hot Off the Press!

I know many of you are fans of the little we make with illustrations by different artists, so without further ado I introduce our newest bookmark designed by Leif Goldberg. For those of you unaware of Leif’s work he is the brain behind National Waste, maker of those awesome silk screened calendars we get every year, and one of the mighty muscles behind the infamous Paper Rodeo. So next time your in the store scoop one up and keep your collection complete!

I wonder if any of you can name all the artists who have made bookmarks for us?